Roberto Martínez commended the numerous VAR interventions that helped Portugal past Croatia, and said there was no “lucky call”, after his team narrowly edged an incident-packed match to progress to the last 16 of the World Cup.
For the first time in the history of the tournament four goals were disallowed in the same game, with Croatia seeing three separate efforts chalked off, while Ronaldo also had a goal overturned. The final incident came in the very last seconds when Josko Gvardiol thought he had equalised in the 103rd minute of the match, only to be called offside. A snick-o-meter had detected the slightest of contacts between the ball and a teammate’s head as it crossed the box.
“I have incredible admiration for Croatia and I admire their sporting nature”, Martínez said after the match. “But the balls now have a chip in them, and it is clear why VAR intervened. The decisions were all correct today, the penalty [for Portugal] was clear. It’s a shame that one of the two teams had to lose but there was no bad decision or lucky call.”
Croatia’s Zlatko Dalic was equally complimentary towards his opponents but was struggling to suppress an obvious frustration with how the match had turned out. “It’s not great when you concede a goal in added time, then you race and score in the last minute and you think it’s a goal and VAR decides otherwise,” he said.
“It’s really difficult to handle, the players are having a hard time. Emotions have been literally killed and all these decisions take the joy out of it. VAR can sometimes be of help but it kills the emotion. It kills whatever is in you and it’s not easy to deal with. Football should be fair but we’ve gone too far with VAR. Croatia lost the match and I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
Ronaldo, at 41, became the oldest player to score in a World Cup knockout match when he converted Portugal’s penalty kick and after the match shared a number of moments with Luka Modric, his fellow icon of the game, who is now expected to retire from international football.
“This was probably his last World Cup and I’m sorry it ended this way,” Dalic said. “Luka was one of our key players today. He has shown his quality and his character once again, and was leading Croatia until the very end.”
Ronaldo pulled on a No 21 shirt at the end of the match in a tribute to his former teammate Diogo Jota, who died a year ago. “The coincidence of life, it’s unbelievable,” Ronaldo said. “We knew it before the game. It was a special moment. We speak today, our group, about that, the coincidence of life.”
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